From the Pulpit:

 
It was just about this time of year five years ago when I met with the people who were serving on the vestry of this church for a supper of Subway sandwiches in Tom Harrison ’s company conference room. It was kind of like a blind date. I knew a few people at St. Alban’s because I’d led a couple of women’s retreats here. I’d liked them and had a good time. The vestry had been told by Andy Doyle , who was canon to the ordinary at that time, that he thought I might be a good fit to be your next rector. They had seen my resume and my spiritual autobiography, I’d met with the senior warden, and some stealth worshipers had come to St. David’s to hear me preach. We were definitely checking each other out.

Well, five years later, I’m very happy to be here, but it was important at that meeting that we were all honest about who we were, what our expectations were, and what gifts we had to share in this common ministry. And I remember saying as clearly as I knew how  that if what you all needed in your next rector was a CEO or another lawyer, well, then you had better not call a poet to be your priest.

Let me be clear. I do not put myself in the same category as Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson, or Mary Oliver or Billy Collins, who are two of the great contemporary poets of our time, but you can pretty much count on hearing me quote them from time to time because poets have the gift of saying so perfectly what the theologians try to say, what is at the very heart of the gospel, but poets say it in words we can all understand.

We need clarity today. We need gospel preached in terms we can understand because the Holy Trinity is at its very heart totally incomprehensible. This is the only Sunday of our year that is focused solely on a doctrine of the church, and what’s more, the doctrine of the Trinity is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. Actually, there are precious few places in scripture where Father,  Son, and Holy Spirit are mentioned in the same sentence.

If we go back and read the earliest church fathers we get a glimpse of what the young church was like. In the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of Paul we get snapshots of how people were dealing with the loss of the Jesus as their leader and the bizarre phenomenon of his having been resurrected and his ascension to heaven and, ultimately, the descent of the Holy Spirit  to dwell among them and within them. They asked a question we are still asking today: How then shall we live?

One of the things we have to keep reminding ourselves of as we read Paul and other early theologians is that they had nobody’s shoulders to stand on. They couldn’t turn to reference books because they were writing the first theology, and they couldn’t check their beliefs against the canon of orthodoxy because there was no such animal. Each and every little community was figuring out by trial and error what it meant to live in certain knowledge of the Christ experience and with the power of the Spirit indwelling amongst them. They were learning their faith by living their faith.

In the tradition of the Jewish practice of midrash, which is embroidering the bare bones of scripture in order to discover its deeper meanings, and of arguing with scripture in the tradition of Abraham, who didn’t hesitate to argue with God’s own self, they tossed this incredible story around, tugged at loose threads, tried variations on for size, shone light into the dark recesses of their questions and, in time, one community at a time, they wove the tapestry of what we have come to know as doctrine.

There was, of course, one question at the heart of it: Who was Jesus? We have to keep reminding ourselves that these first followers of the Way were Jewish to the bone. Not for one second did Paul or Andrew or Peter or Nathaniel entertain the thought that they might  be birthing another tradition, much less a church. They knew Holy Scripture inside and out, and they knew the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and what they knew about that God -- the God who had delivered their people from bondage in Egypt, who had given the law on stone tablets to Moses, who had spoken through the prophets and had promised that they would possess their own land and be as abundant as the stars in the sky -- what they knew before anything else about their God was that he was radically and emphatically ONE ! He was not a panoply of minor deities, squabbling for power the way their neighbors’ gods were. He was not selfish or petty. All they had to do was worship this one God and all his promises would come true.

So it does seem odd that by the fourth century when the Emperor Constantine commanded all the bishops to come to Nicaea with their armies to hammer out a uniform statement of Christian faith what they would come up with was a God in three persons. The Jews were scandalized, but by then the church was almost entirely gentile.

Here’s the deal: if you can explain to me and to all of us just how one God can be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, well, I’ll be happy to sit down and let you come up here and fill us in. There have been lots of good attempts by faithful lovers of God. You’re familiar with them. St. Patrick held up the three-leafed shamrock to the Irish barbarians. Others have said it’s like H2O, which can be water or steam or ice, or the light of the sun, which is a gaseous fireball 93,000,000 miles away, the beams, whether wave or particle, that travel through space, and the warmth we feel on our skin on a summer’s day. One of the most satisfying comes from St. Augustine who posed that God is the lover, Jesus is the beloved, and the Holy Spirit is the love that binds them together. If one of these does the trick for you, I say, go for it.

One good thing about being an Episcopalian, though, is that we don’t have to agree. We say the creed that was hammered out by those bishops in Nicaea in 325 -- though I dare say there are good Episcopalians, good Christians, who say it with their fingers crossed behind their backs, or who take a deep breath and remain silent on one or more of the doctrinal statements -- what it means to one of us to say that God is Father very well may mean something entirely different to somebody else. The joy of this faith we share is that it is more about our coming together to worship than it is about our beliefs.

The Celtic saints of the Fifth through the Eighth Centuries lived a radically Trinitarian faith, and they are responsible for the survival of Christianity as it was Irish monks copying manuscripts in locations too inhospitable to be invaded by barbarians who kept these treasures from being lost forever. Their call to witness that faith took the form of their leaving home on those same inhospitable seas to sail, literally to God knew where, to the places of their Resurrection, and there to preach the good news to whoever met them there. Their dynamic of evangelism was quite different, though, from what we are accustomed to today. They held that one belonged to a community first, and only once they were woven into the weft of the family did they come to belief.

There is the day in the life of every baby in this parish, when they are brought to the altar in the arms of a parent, and I can see in the baby’s eyes as she looks at the wafer and sees her father take it and eat it that she understands perfectly what is going on. She knows full well what a cookie is, and she’ll reach out her chubby little hand because she wants one. It is up to parents as to when your child receives communion, and I grew up in a church that told me I could not take communion until I was confirmed and understood what it meant. But to this day, I do not understand it, and understanding is not what it is about. That baby understands it as well as I do.

It is about belonging to each other, to God, to Christ, to the Holy Spirit. The theologians have split hairs over it for millennia, but the poets get it.

I don’t know if Mary Oliver considered herself a Christian when she wrote this poem, called Wild Geese, but that is irrelevant.
She writes:    

We do not have to be good. We are not called to be right. As Mother Theresa said, we are not called to be successful. We are called to be faithful, and to claim our place, to claim it with wild abandon and endless gratitude, to claim it as we embrace our sisters and brothers in the family of things.

Amen.